Category Archives: Pop Culture

What does loneliness sound like? A scream that no one seems to hear. Gasps that don’t make it past the throat. Sentences written in invisible ink. The redacted words on a page.

It’s feeling unwanted, unnecessary, irrelevent even. Then you remember. You still exist. The print under the graffiti, the face under the veil, the writing on discarded applications. The breaths you leave behind in desolate corridors hang in there, unobliterated. Loneliness can sound an awful lot like peace then.

Who are you when the screams die down, when the words fade? Maybe we are all lonely.

I found my insides erupt in rapture, during conversations about maths, punctuated with memories of every mood. And through everything a steady beat, because what else is mathematics but the joy of patterns, the collective staccato of beating hearts? Rhythm reminds you of the notes you only pretend don’t exist but you hear them in your head anyway. Always.

Afterwards, I walked in silence by myself, briefly entering conversations of eyes and lips while crossing roads and running an errand. Still on beat. The shrill taps leading the unheard booms.

Later, I read a book sitting in a bookshop. Periodically I’d look up, watching other people like myself, readers moving through bookshelves, each in a dance of their own thought streams. These were the skipped beats, the pauses that make up melody as much as the notes. The romance of this, is what drives musicians and writers to wax eloquent. It is the null state of mathematics, the shunyata of meditation.

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Much gets said about the frenzied pace of a metropolis and its coldness. But every big city is an organism of parallel layers, bubbles even, that jostle along, seemingly oblivious to the others’ presence. My city is Tinsel Town, it’s the financial capital, it’s the safest city, it’s a port, a tropical island, an organised crime base, a place starved for time and space and a mental border between South and North India. I inhabit a few of these bubbles and only occasionally, with great effort, do I cross over to the others. Because they are all Mumbai and anything that is Mumbai is mine to witness, to touch and experience and love.

In 2009, the BMC, Mumbai’s civic body invited citizens to come paint the walls of an arterial road abutting the railway track. I jumped at the opportunity to splash paint and spend a day on the streets. A lot of friendships were made that day that we spent whitewashing, priming and rendering street art on the rough wall of Tulsi Pipe Road.

A post shared by Ramya 🏊🏽‍♀️🌱📚 (@ideasmithy) on May 28, 2019 at 8:07pm PDT

The paint has since worn away and been covered and recovered with other such wall projects. The pavement dwellers who were displaced for this day of fun for the more affluent, have eked out their homes again too. Bollywood posters come up now and then and in the past year, election campaigns as well.

The city grows and breathes with every newcomer here. I just got to lay my handprint on it for a day. Even if it lies buried under layers of others, the city and I communed that day in September.

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Do you say all the things to the world that you wish somebody would say to you? Do you spend your moments putting out what you’ve been told will come back to you, manifold?

It can feel like a lonely world when you find yourself sole custodian of cheer and hope and joy and good humour. The thing is, people don’t always mean to be exploitative. But we live in a starved world where to see something means to covet it, not be inspired by it.

How do you keep hope in a transactional universe? Even the principle of karma which is about taking control of and responsibility for your own actions, thoughts and feelings has been turned into a debit-and-credit column of good acts and returns owed. How do you find hope in a world that’s unwilling to give it to you? I’ll tell you.

Close your eyes. Close it to the impoverishment of hearts. Close it to the starved souls. Close it to the morally bankrupt, the ethically careless, the selfish and those who would live from fear instead of hope. Close it, pull yourself in for a minute. Pull back all the good sentiment you put out into the universe. Feel it return to you in silvery streaks of caring, in gold threads of loyalty, in star-studded clouds of faith, in bow-tied ribbons of connection. Feel them nourish your soul, feel them bind together the fragmenting pieces of you.

You are good. You are well. You are okay. Your quest for hope and love is not about handing them out to other people, in return for their reciprocal gifts. You are on a journey, not a child’s birthday party. Your lesson is not to find hope. It is to become HOPE.

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We glorify anger. We present and consume revenge sagas, hate politics. This is an easy narrative because feeling hard done by is a universal experience and few other things incite people to react as blindly. We justify rage reactions, arguing for the right to be furious and citing catchphrases like ‘tone policing’ and ‘right to expression’. We dramatize and applaud wrath.

We even turn emotionally shut off, violent, abusive people into role models for masculinity and how the ideal human being at the top should be. Behaving the way your oppressors have behaved with you only makes you part of the problem. Yet, we prize anger like it’s a value.

First, there is dealing with your own anger in a healthy, constructive way rather than allowing it to make you a ravening monster. And then there is navigating a world that prizes wrath.

You can’t avoid angry people or situations that make others and you angry. But you can remember that anger is always, ultimately poisonous. And choose, keep choosing not to consume it. When you do, spit it out like any other rotten thing you may have eaten, sneeze it out like that fiery bit of chilli you breathed. Cry a little, wipe your tears and breathe afresh again. You can own your anger.

What about the anger of others? You do not have to be defined or cowed by other people’s wrath stories. Hold your precious self above the world’s reactions. Protect your hard-earned peace of mind, body and spirit from from those who have not yet learnt how to do that for themselves.

There are people who will treat you badly, because they think they’re owed a revenge opportunity against the world. It is not your job to educate them. It is not your place to deny them their life lessons. But it is your job to get out of their way. Maybe that is your life lesson.

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I was fascinated by the saree as a child. Unfettered by stitches, lacking the artifice of buttons, a saree was freedom.

I’ve struggled with gender boxes my whole life. Every damn thing, a fucking war. Short hair. Tattoos. Red clothes. Short clothes. Boots, not sandals. Science projects. Marketing jobs. An analytical mind. Single status. Silver, not gold. Diamonds I paid for. Sci-fi. A love of graphic novels. English poetry. Silent performance. A business. A band. A breakup. A failed engagement. Boundaries. These became my trophies.

Warriors don’t wear shyness, they wear war paint. I RAGE, oh how I rage. I rage with the eloquence of Alanis Morissette. I rage in the shriek of Gwen Stefani. I rage with the mellow harshness of Tracy Chapman. I rage in all the ways of women who refuse to be pretty.

But sarees, these speak of modesty, of tradition, of maternal memories, none of which identify me. I’ve struggled to find my self in a saree. Should a love of this garment mean I trade in my warrior card? Must I pay for the respect accorded to a saree with my right to rage?

How do I not lose the essential me in the drapes? How do I keep a palluv from stifling my scream? How can my inner supernova burn through the folds? How do I keep my steel from drowning in cotton? Always a war. I found my saree self in the bitter eloquent long locks of Alanis Morissette, the dark chocolate wrath of Tracy Chapman and Gwen Stefani saying don’t speak in red lipstick.

My colours are clashing screams. My patterns are silent drama. My folds are parodies of shame. This is who I am, in a saree, in a dress, on stage, on screen, on a page, in relationships, in my sleep. It looks like in the next second, I’m going to turn & run sat you so you want to get out of the way real quick. You won’t want to be caught in the fire gaze of those eyes. Someone called this a superhero pose. I’ll name it Angry Girl of the Indie Rock Persuasion. I wear the label, it doesn’t wear me.

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What if we were all places instead of people? Towering construction. Sweeping grasslands. A rabbit hole. A pothole. A wrought iron staircase. A treehouse. The ground floor of a building under redevelopment plans. A library. A cell for illegal aliens. The verandah of a brothel. A nursery. The last window of a factory floor. A town square. The green room of a fading star. A shop.

Aren’t we all places already? We are worlds unto ourselves with gates & doors called identity. Know me and gain entry.

Some of us are plush, luxuriant drawing rooms that invite guests to sink in and never leave. Some are spider webs, some carpets, some thresholds. Someone is a transit point on public transport, bright, always impersonal, always busy. Somebody is a bus-stop in the rain, holding both promise and fear. There’s always a person who is the most comfortable spot under a tree, perfect at a particular time and one season. And there’s the one who is your favourite spot on a threadbare sofa with creaking hinges, whose prods & pokes spell comfortable familiarity. One person is an amusement park and another is a discotheque – one lively in the day, another at night and each full of gloomy foreboding at other times. There are even those who are museums, furniture shops, antique stores.

And what else are those we envy but places we look at in a glossy brochure, wishing we were there? Ah, but they tell us, you wouldn’t want to live here.

What is the place that you are? And is it your favourite spot in the world

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Gully Boy was rife with triggers for me. For one, it’s about a rapper and everything that starts with rap will always remind me of the person who changed my life when he walked (rapped?) his way into it in 2010. At a less intense but still supporting-the-triggers way, the story is based on the lives of people I have seen in their early days, within the context of the same person.

I knew these would happen which is probably why I steered clear of the massive hooplah around the film before its release. The strength of my defence mechanisms is so powerful, I even fell asleep right in the middle of an afternoon with friends because one of them was singing a song from the film non-stop. But yesterday, Manisha said it was such a good film that she’d want to watch it again and I heard emotion in her voice when she said “So many layers, so many thoughts in that slum kid’s head.” Given she knows just how deep my wounds run, it felt like the movie might still carry an experience over and above those. So today, I watched the film.

I had to step out to breathe and wash my face in the intermission, it felt like so many narrow brushes with darkness. But somehow they didn’t linger. Maybe it’s the place I am in, in my own head or maybe it’s that the movie manages a light touch with things that move me but don’t cut me.

<spoiler alert> About a third into the movie, I felt my breath catch as I began to hate Ranveer’s character with disproportionate rage. The cheating, the lying, the injustice of his greedy ambition overshadowing and nullifying all things that supported him, just because he didn’t have to care anymore. I lived through that story. I saw the face of a monster in the man I loved, when I realised that he really truly, didn’t care what happened to anyone else as long as he got what he wanted. That really was the only real trigger. I had been wondering how I would fare on my assignment to myself this week to work on forgiveness, especially after this. Luckily, the story saved itself and its characters. And it brought me to an insight.<end spoiler alert>

The man I was with, possibly didn’t hate me at first. But he enjoyed the story of his life as he had constructed it (so much pain, woe is me, much much anger, rage and burn and kill the world, tortured artist etc.). And he hated that I did not fit into that. He tried his best to by positing me to his friends as a clingy, manipulative, jealous girlfriend. He even convinced my friends to join him in steadily taunting me about being ‘high maintenance’. But those were shallow narratives as best, as person after person would meet me or discover that they knew me from my blogs or elsewhere and see a mismatch. A well-adjusted relationship didn’t fit his story of Misunderstood Tortured Soul and a feminist would and did call out his constant wokebro homophobia and misogyny which had to be inconvenient at least. How ironic that I know some of these terms because of him but not really considering he also took perverse pleasure in introducing me to the concept of gaslighting with the statement “It’s what I do to you”.

I’m suddenly realising that this may not have all been planned and constructed as I’d envisioned. He’s not as smart as that. This kind of machiavellian thought requires thinking about other people, their motivations and weaknesses in the kind of depth that he lacks. I think some people build their stories and they are very attached to them. Maybe they deserve the right to hold on to their stories. And anyone attempting to change those must expect very primal (and in the case of the monster, poisonous) attack.

It’s easier for me to see this in the light of everything I’ve been experiencing since mid-December, with someone else. He reminds me of my ex. But he is not my ex and sometimes I have trouble remembering that. I am stuck in my own story as well. But when I’m able to lift my head above that confusion, I can see there’s enough in common and one of the similarities is this. He also believes passionately in the story of his life (and it’s not a dissimilar one). While his reactions to me haven’t been as violent, parasitic or unreasonable, there is the fact that he is about a decade older than the monster was, when I first met him. It’s just possible that he’s not a monster (though my story traps me into seeing that as a ‘maybe’ at best). But the story stands between him and me. And I have no business rattling those bars.

Maybe it is enough to have beautiful albeit aborted episodes of magic. There is one in the film and that was moving too.

Once I wrote that being a storyteller was my saving grace since it meant I could edit my narrative of life. But there are different kinds of stories and different sorts of storytellers. Some find solace in the rigidity of their stories while some like me, find wings in their fluidity. No one is to say one storyteller is better than another.

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February In The City – Part 1

When I was a child, my primary school building had a tree growing in the ramshackle courtyard outside. One had to climb a few boulders and avoid the loose stones and holes burrowed in by rodents to reach up. And once one got there, it wasn’t comfortable since it grew on a huge, sharp-edged rock. It also offered very little shade, having dwindled in foliage over no one knows how many generations of children. But the tree did allow for contact, if you knew how to reach it. And I did. To its northwest, angled towards the steep side and atop a jagged patch of rock, was a spot just big enough for my bottom to perch on, legs drawn up close. And if you were small and kept very quiet, no one would come looking for you to tease or order or threaten to tell a teacher.

I’d go there every few days, having failed to find my place in the complicated world of primary school. People were full of greed and jealousy and spite and temper. But the tree was peace. It was silent, harmonious in a way my numerous music tutors never would be. I never needed to speak words aloud, fearing correction, judgement or sneering. The tree seemed to know. In its company, my bruised little heart would feel the gentle embrace of its shadow (the only spot where it fell, right over where I sat). Trees feel safe to me. They are old and carry the lessons of time, unlike buildings which only speak of their builders money and politics.

I spotted this tree at the junction of a rapidly disappearing Mumbai (the textile mill belt) and the greedy new city emerging in its place. Flanked by the wall of an old mill and facing a spanking new skyscraper, this one holds stories that would fill history books, only no one will ever write one. But I listened and it gave me a glimpse into a thousand lives, in a single breath. I can still talk to trees and they still carry stories. Thank you, old friend.

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Why do we look back when the natural way of things is to move forward? Because it’s easy? Because it’s nicer? Life never seems quite as wonderful when it is being lived. But in comparison with what we’re feeling and facing and surviving at this moment, the heydays seem like glorious times.

I know why this is so. An experience being lived is an onslaught of sights and sounds and feelings and thoughts and information hitting us faster than we can handle. Later, we examine our scars, our lint, our debris and flotsam. Sometimes, we add to it from what someone else said or something we read or learnt elsewhere. And we construct a story. We build a painting. The present has a way of being simultaneously overpowering and mundane at the same time. So in our stories to ourselves, we colour hard and deep.

The colour spectrum of life goes in the opposite direction from a ray of light going through a prism. The future is an unknown cavern of blankness. The present is a hard prism that’s simultaneously confusing and colourless. But the past, the past is every colour we choose to lay on it. We are light beams travelling backwards in time, just as we are conscious experience moving forward.

Small wonder then, so many of us spend our lives rapidly turning forwards and backwards, always worried we’re going to run into some disaster but unable to keep our eyes away from the alluring past for too long. The blankness ahead is inviting and scary and what we’ve left behind reminds us of the colour we turn it into. The past is technicolour and we are the prisms that make it so.

On my other blog: XX Factor: XX Factor

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